Andreas Bender's Biography

Andreas Bender,
Lecturer,
The University of Cambridge

Dr Andreas Bender is a Lecturer for Molecular Informatics with the Centre for Molecular Science Informatics at the Department of Chemistry of the University of Cambridge, leading a group of about 20 postdocs, PhD and graduate students and academic visitors. In his work, Andreas is involved with the integration and analysis of chemical and biological data, aimed at understanding phenotypic compound action (such as cellular readouts, and also organism-level effects) on a mechanistic level, ranging from compound efficacy to toxicity. He received his PhD from the University of Cambridge as a Cambridge Gates Scholar in 2005 and worked in the Lead Discovery Informatics group at Novartis in Cambridge/MA as well as at Leiden University in the Netherlands before his current post. Andreas received the EFMC Young Medicinal Chemist in Academia Prize in 2010, as well as the Medicinal Chemistry Innovation Prize of the German Chemical and Pharmaceutical Societies (GDCh and DPhG) and the 'Bayer Early Excellence in Science Award' in 2011. In 2012 he received the LRI Innovative Science Award of the European Chemical Industry Council (CEFIC) and in 2013 he was awarded an ERC Starting Grant to model mixture effects of chemical structures in biological systems using mechanistic approaches, an area currently very little understood.

In our work, we explore how chemical and biological information from different domains -such as ligand-target prediction, microarray readouts, and RNA-Seq information - can be used separately, or in combination, in order to understand the mode of action of a compound (such
as a hit from high-content screening) in greater detail.